Wednesday:Ricky had just returned from a presentation by Mel White, author of Religion Gone Bad, and was detailing some of the arguments presented. Then the conversation turned to current threads and psychiatry as well as an attempt to convert an avatar to audio. It should have been foreseeable that such an attempt would lead playing around with the chat sounds, but it wasn’t. Then the choice between marriage and burning all your stuff on your front lawn. Those who haven’t gone through marriage may be tempted to choose the first. 404 errors and more shop talk led us back to further discussion on the threads and what not to do about them. This finally spawned off into the recent satirical threads HalfMooner started posting. The rest of the night was poetry which mostly consisted of insulting limericks.

“…The Reverend Mel White, a deeply religious man who sees fundamentalism as ‘evangelical Christian orthodoxy gone cultic,’ believes that it is not a stretch to say that the true goal of today’s fundamentalists is to break down the wall that separates church and state, superimpose their ‘moral values’ on the U.S. Constitution, replace democracy with theocratic rule, and ultimately create a new ‘Christian America’ in their image. White’s new book, Religion Gone Bad, is a wake-up call to all of us to take heed.

White is singularly qualified to write this exposé of the Christian Right because he himself was a true believer who served the evangelical movement as pastor, professor, filmmaker, television producer, author, and ghostwriter for such fundamentalist leaders as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Billy Graham, all of whom he got to know well. As he writes, ‘These are not just Neocons dressed in religious drag. These men see themselves as gurus called by God to rescue America from unrighteousness. They believe this is a Christian nation that must be returned forcibly to its Christian roots’…”

The mission of the Skeptic Friends Network is to promote skepticism, critical thinking, science and logic as the best methods for evaluating all claims of fact, and we invite active participation by our members to create a skeptical community with a wide variety of viewpoints and expertise.